Tag Archives: Devices

Most of us that have been using Magisk for our root needs have probably been installing the latest beta builds. Through them, we’ve seen incremental improvements and additions to the stability and functionality of the root tool. And now Magisk developer topjohnwu has decided that all these recent additions are stable enough for everyone to enjoy, as a new update to Magisk has been released to stable.

If you updated to v15, which was also a stable release, you might have run into a small bit of trouble.

One of the most basic and convenient features of life in Google’s ecosystem is contacts sync. From email to phone numbers and Google+ profiles, you know that whatever platform you are on, you’ll be able to reach out to the people you need to with a minimum of fuss. But for some this essential feature isn’t working correctly, and contacts aren’t being successfully synced to their Oreo-powered Android devices.

Google offers so many products and services, it can be hard to keep track of them all. Google tries to address this problem with Dashboard, a place to view all of your account’s data in one place. But the page has never had a mobile layout, so trying to use it on phones has been somewhat of a pain.

Google announced on its company blog that a new Dashboard layout for mobile devices.

LineageOS has done an impressive job with adding official support for more and more devices. The last time we took a look at the ROM, it had improved its Jelly browser and merged the August security patch to all its devices. Now even more phones are receiving official builds, including the OnePlus 5.

The most exciting new device is the OnePlus 5 (cheeseburger), which has had unofficial builds for a while now.

Back at Google I/O in May, Google announced Play Protect, the consumer-facing evolution of Verify Apps, which is the background app check service that makes sure you don’t have any suspicious or malicious software installed on your device. Verify Apps has existed for many years and has grown from an opt-in feature to an opt-out one, then to a background process, and then earlier in February it started displaying the apps it had scanned.

If you happen to still own a Google Glass unit, yesterday’s mysterious update of the MyGlass companion app might have had you thinking about dusting off the headset to see if it could still hold a charge… If you could ever really say Glass held a charge. In possibly the biggest tease (or troll) for Glass owners, today brings an even bigger surprise: New firmware. Yes, if you leave Glass connected to the Internet for a little while, it should download and install the brand new XE23 update.

Android Wear started off, as many Google products do, as something closer to a proof-of-concept than a finished product. The first watches had problems, the software was unfinished, and tech companies were the only ones producing them. Now that Android Wear is becoming a more mature platform, mostly thanks to the long-awaited 2.0 update, we’re starting to see more watches than ever hit the market.

It was fairly easy to compare Android Wear watches in years past – only a handful of tech companies even bothered.

Changing the animation speed is a little-known trick with Android, and can often make your device feel faster. But if you want to make animations faster than normal, you are left with two options – 0.5x the normal speed, or completely turned off.

What if you want something like 75% normal speed? Well, it turns out you can easily set a custom animation speed. Reddit user quantumsuicide wrote a fantastic guide, which I have made a bit easier for ADB newbies here.

Bless you, Xposed Framework. Thou art the last refuge of power users whose hardware has been forsaken by manufacturer and ROM developer alike. The root-enabled tool has a new module that back-ports a bunch of Android Nougat features to earlier versions of the OS. It’s called AndroidN-ify, and the latest update includes a tweak that exposes Google’s fancy new voice-controlled Assistant search tool to users on Android 6.0. An earlier build.prop tweak allowed Android 7.0 users to try Assistant on non-Pixel phones, which won’t be officially supported when the new hardware launches.

After AT&T and T-Mobile confirmed they are both halting Samsung Galaxy Note7 sales, and reports claiming Samsung is temporarily halting production of the device, Verizon has followed suit and halted its selling of the handset as well. The phones – both original and replacement models – can still be exchanged for something less, um, likely to explode, though.

This follows after it was claimed a replacement Note7 – i.e. the one that should have been fixed – caught fire shortly before takeoff on a Southwest Airlines flight bound for Baltimore.